Same, looks greatAs for a recommendation, it is a known classic but Donna Tartt's The Secret History is bloody brilliant. 100% worth a read. Made me get off my arse and organise starting French Lessons next year as well
Quote from: Wellsy on December 04, 2023, 09:18:19 amSame, looks greatAs for a recommendation, it is a known classic but Donna Tartt's The Secret History is bloody brilliant. 100% worth a read. Made me get off my arse and organise starting French Lessons next year as wellAgree with that. Apart from the French lessons...The Goldfinch and My Little Friend by the same author are also excellent I thought.
.The Goldfinch
Loved The Secret History, sadly got about halfway through Goldfinch and gave up. Not enough going on..
I'm pretty impressed by how far you managed to get to in the Goldfinch-nonsense. I got like three pages in before putting it down.(My method is usually to read the first two-three pages, and if it is great I check page 47 to see if that is good as well, then I soldier on. I learned this simple trick from a guy that chaired the committee that decides the Nobel Prize in Literature. He grew up in a neighbouring village)
(My method is usually to read the first two-three pages, and if it is great I check page 47 to see if that is good as well, then I soldier on. I learned this simple trick from a guy that chaired the committee that decides the Nobel Prize in Literature. He grew up in a neighbouring village)
When I get a new book, I read the last page first. That way, if I die before I finish I know how it comes out. That, my friend, is a dark side
That's my Nobel Prize sorted then..... killer 3 pages then shite for 46 then a great page 47 then garbage again for the rest. Or am I missing something?
I've just finished a book I think a lot of people here might enjoy (indeed, might have read already). In 1950s Togo, a young boy has a nearly deadly encounter with a snake, recovering he reads a book about Greenland and becomes obsessed with travelling there. In 1958, aged 16, he ran away from home and spent the next eight years working his way through Africa and Europe before eventually reaching Greenland in 1964. In Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland Tété-Michel Kpomassie tells the remarkable (true) story of that journey and, in particular, the eighteen months he spent living among the inidigenous Greenlanders, by whom he seems to have been welcomed without question. It is a rich, vivid, and humane portrayal both of the author as a young man and of a culture even then coming under immense pressure (Denmark does not come out of this particularly well). A highly unusual and very worthwhile piece of travel writing. First published in English in 1981, Penguin reissued it last year.
If you want something exquisitely written and much, much gentler then I can really recommend The Offing. A coming of age novel set around Robin Hoods Bay.
That's interesting, I really didn't get on with the Offing. Just found it irritating from start to finish. I loved the grittiness of his other stuff and wanted more!
